Apparently I’ve got worse!

The biggest leak apparently was losing at showdown too often (obviously a bad thing to lose at showdown, but what they mean is that I’m not folding earlier in the hand enough). Their ‘ideal’ range is about 51-58%. Previously I was 46.7%, now it’s 46.4%, so failed there (oh, actual stat is W$SD%, so bigger the % the better).

Next was Flop fold to cbet – I wasn’t folding enough, they want 46-63% and again I’m still falling short with no improvement from previously.

However my cbet% has rocketed from 40% to 80%, actually overshooting their recommended range (but only by a couple of percent, earning me an A-).

So I’m annoyed with myself now – I thought I was folding LOADS more, but evidently not. I was even thinking that I was playing better, even though it took a bit of spewage mid-way;

Well, probably I am playing better really. There’s definitely fewer catastrophic crashes where I continually failed to fold marginals vs obvious monsters – I have folded a lot more QQ, KK & Aces than ever before!

Here’s a hand for amusement’s sake. Possibly if I didn’t show results it would even look reasonably played (plus subtle nanostake brag involving stack sizes)

That puts me on the edge of being rolled for $20s. There’s a weird deja-vu as this is exactly what happened last christmas. I guess that means I should perhaps do my roundup of 2010 now;

January

2010 was the first year I really tried heads-up NLHE for the first time. I’d messed around with a few shootout MTTs but nothing with any thought behind it. Yegor told me to switch to husngs because he was printing money and had been saying how good they were for ages. He said try 50 microstakes matches and see if it works out.

Apparently it worked out The 50 $5s went well enough, andI quickly jumped to the $10s. I immediately had a nice heater, which left me nicely rolled to try $20s.

February – May

The $20s were tricky, but somehow I managed to scrape enough to try some $30s. 4man shootouts in particular seemed to support my BR more than regular matches;

The nice BR gave me the opportunity to buy some coaching, pay for sites like sharkscope, and generally whimsical prop-bets (still hardly balla, but fun nevertheless). With a BR of $1000 I was marginally rolled for $50 games, and dipped my toes a couple of times.

May-July

Then it all went wrong;

Game after game was lost. I followed proper bankroll management and moved down as I past each threshold, but it didn’t ease off. Utterly miserable 3 months

July-December

The rest of the year was a complete rethink of what had happened. I moved right down to $2 games so I could pound out game after game with relatively no impact on the remains of my bankroll. The hope was that I could really watch what I was doing to see if there had been any element of skill in my rise, or whether the whole thing is just variance in action.

The rethink worked, and I saw what I had done wrong. Putting it into practice hasn’t been easy though – hard to change the spots of an old dog.

Essentially my fundamentals are fairly solid – preflop I was raising appropriately (albeit with some 3bet leaks pointed out by Yegor), postflop I was getting value ok (not too hard at these stakes – bet,bet,bet!), while for bluffs my flop cbets and turn double barrels were ok too. What I was doing wrong though was bluffing in large pots and making poor hero calls. Forcing myself to stop doing this was a bit tricky – to see an idiot donk out with a PSB was like waving a red flag to me.

So this month I’ve been folding, and concentrating on the value bets. The results were fairly immediate, and even better the lost matches obviously showed the same hero calling leaks which reinforced my belief that I’ve worked out where it was going wrong. Now I need to keep trying to get the balance right and not let the bluff demon back in as I move up in stakes.

My initial thought was disappointment that my plans for moving to Bristol or Cardiff were shot to hell now since I’ll never find a job over there within a month. But within hours of putting my CV out for Cambridge/London jobs I’d already got a couple of interviews lined up, and I began to think ‘Cool – a job in no time, and the rest of this gardening leave will be poker, tennis and daytime TV – bring it on!!!’.

However the phone carried on ringing, more telephone interviews, a bunch of coding tests, some face to face interviews and it turned out that this week has been non-stop, stressful, and virtually no poker!
Of course I shouldn’t be complaining, but it’s been really hard work (whiiine) – the coding tests have been quite challenging, phone call quickfire test are hideous etc etc. In fact here’s a coding test I flunked, it was a tricky manipulation of a dataset, followed by just saving the data as comma separated values. The manipulation worked flawlessly, but on my save function they decided to go uberfussy;

FAIL – Should have done;

meh. Or at least it would be if I hadn’t spent two hours coding the rest of the fucking thing.

So next week I’ve two interviews with London banks for x2 salaries (whoohoo), plus a decent job in Cambridge, so all looking positive.

On another note got some poker coaching after joining in on this pyramid scheme. A guy called Adam Loeffler (ajloeffl on 2p2) had the honour of going through some HH’s with me, and we did this with a replayer & teamviewer/skype. Turned out to be an awesome session, and I learnt a whole bunch of things. As well as that I’ve definitely squashed my ‘everyone’s bluffing’ chip on my shoulder and my husngs lately have been very controlled. Which of course is showing rewards in terms of winning. I’m up to $5 games off that original $10, and might as well continue to build from that – my old BR can just stay as spendables in my current account since it might come in useful if things don’t pan out jobwise…

I did manage to sort out some problems with my game though (around tournament 15), but as you can see from the red ‘luck adjusted’ line I ran into enough ‘bad luck’ to not make any difference (tbh I don’t put any credence into these EV adjusted values at all, but like any good statistics; when they prove your point they must be right). It was pretty bad though, and one game I was up $2550 vs $450 when I disconnected – by the time I rebooted my shitty modem and reconnected I was the one with $300 left

Nevertheless, the problem I sorted out was my starting range. When I started out on husngs I was playing by instinct, taking my 6max range and widening it out to what felt right, and all was good with big rocketing graphs every day. I then found a starting range on husng.com and started implementing that.

Since that day I’ve broken even. Small sample, but it wasn’t right at all – I was getting into too many marginal spots, ending up overcommitting and spending most of my time fighting to come back from behind. So today I took a step back and thought what a heads-up range for SNGs ought to be. Basically since in a husng we’re playing shortstack poker most of the time, it makes sense that the Nash table is giving us the right distribution- after all, it’s calculated from the all-in preflop equity you have in a hand based on two players under shortstacked conditions.

So I twiddled around with the ratios until it presented 70% and 30% of the hands (so 70% is my opening range on the button and 30% is my calling range on BB). In this table the 70% is everything except the light grey, and the 30% is in bold;

The husng.com table varied in that it had the entire suited side for opening under the button with the junk as mainly the bottom section of the unsuited corner. TBH the husng.com table was for a cash player, and so that’s a very different dynamic, so I’m not saying it was wrong. But for husngs, it was totally unsuitable. My games instantly improved, with the number of awkward decisions vastly reduced. Shame the number of idiot calls that sucked out on the river didn’t.

Also I don’t care what anyone says about not needing hand charts. They’ll tell you that heads up is fluid and your range depends entirely on what’s best to beat your opponent. That’s true, but without having a solid and appropriate foundation from which to add or remove hands you’re just building castles in the air…

So, getting rid of the ‘gut feeling’ stuff means getting to grips with Nash equilibrium theory, and all the charts and guff that comes with it. Not that it’s complicated really – two charts in all;

1) if you’re the one going to push (or not):

2) They’ve pushed – do you call?

(shaded squares = suited hands)

Divide the smallest stack by the big blind and compare it to the value for your hand. If it’s less then shove (or call a shove). If it’s more then either play postflop poker or fold to their shove. You’re supposed to adjust this depending on whether opponent is a nit or an aggrotard, but for now I’ll just take it as it comes – should make me a bit braver for the kill hopefully.

There’s also an excellent spreadsheet a 2p2er created that does this as well as some other theories. Worth a look at (go to last post for his final version).

Update: I knocked up a javascript version here; http://www.meteoricpoker.com/nash.php – enter the values and press return (or tab – basically anything to let it know you’ve changed the value).

Ultimately the thing I’m doing wrong is making my FPS moves too expensive. They might work a lot of the time (honestly!), but I need to recognise when it’s going tits up and give up on that hand earlier while not bloating the pot further.

It didn’t take a genius to figure that one out. In fact I’m too ashamed to post those hands here – they might make you laugh, but I’m not happy about it. However it did get me into the mood of delving into the analysis side of Hold’em Manager and see what it can give me.

I took two periods of my poker ‘career’. Both are NL10, and the first was from April to July last year where I could do no wrong and won $300 over 13,000 hands (21BB/100). The second was my latest 13,000 hands where I’ve won $90 at just under 7BB/100. Nothing wrong with 7BB/100 of course, and the first period looks like a big heater, but it’s still worth a comparison to see if there’s a significant difference somewhere.

I pasted the comparison into a single big image – 21BB/100 on left, latest hands on right;

The first set of boxes is my opening range UTG, MP and CO. I’m kinda pleased with this – I knew that my game has both loosened up and become more aggressive and I was worried that my range had actually become completely wild. It looks fairly well controlled though, and both periods show that I stick to my ranges very solidly (I have no concerns about the lack of balance – what’s the point at NL10 when I rarely play anyone for more than a few hundred hands! That’s also why I’m not worried about publishing it here either, it’s not as if my screen name is meteoric either). As expected my range has widened a bit, mainly at the top end although I’ve also included more suited connectors. The one funny extra is 72o – this is because Ultimate Bet has 72 side bet tables, and it’s worth a quick 3bet or flop cbet with 72o just for this side bet. (Edit – at least, it doesn’t look like it’s gone wild to me, but then I’ve little to compare against. Maybe I shouldn’t loosen up my early position as much as that?)

The rest of the tables compare various situations such as flopped hands, showdown hands and positional stats. Since 13k hands isn’t a huge sample I’ve tried to pinpoint only those areas where the numbers are extremely different. So, from bottom upwards (sorry, that’s just the way they were pasted);

Positional stats at the bottom aren’t much different, and that doesn’t surprise me. It’s been a while since I really came to understand the power of position, and I don’t think I’m spewing too much by playing OOP in the wrong situations.

The flopped hands shows one big anomaly. When I hit a top pair with weak kicker (and no draw), last year I lost about $100 (it’s not too surprising that this is a losing hand, it could easily be out paired on later streets and obviously out-kicked) – the later session though I’ve lost $343 though!  It’s the biggest difference in that table, so I need to see what I’m doing differently. I’m probably just playing them too aggressively and not controlling the pot enough. There are probably two situations – ace with weak kicker, and a low top pair (for instance, 9′s on a 923 board). I need to see which is the one I’m messing up. It’s probably more likely to be the aces I think.

Edit – I’ve just realised this is TPWK or worse, so this is including high card hands. I need to dig a bit deeper. It wouldn’t surprise me that I’m now floating overcards too much…

The river made hands seems to suggest that the first session did owe a lot to being a heater – I seem to make a lot more big hands then than lately. Not much I can do about that, unless of course I’m folding too early too often now. Kindof doubt that though.

Groupings suggest big aces have suffered the most lately. I’m putting this one down to variance too – there are a lot of AK pots which become flips, and so a slight shift in luck can result in a large monetary swing.

So final conclusion – top pair weak kicker = my achilles heel. Need to look into this some more…

The problem is that I know the basics, and when thinking straight can apply them well (including postflop). Once I start winning I start feeling bulletproof and play back at hands which I should just be folding. A few fancy plays go my way and I’m trying to win every pot going. Of course it doesn’t end well…

This month started with a few huge hands that went my way and gave me a 7 buy-in headstart. It took losing every penny of that plus a bit more before I realised I had to take a step back and see that I was being an idiot.

So today I folded when I was obviously beat, and didn’t float all those missed flops. It was a bit swingy, but came out up in the end;

Even nicer, this was on Ultimate Bet where my account had been seriously depleted. This put it back to a reasonable amount where I could multitable without worrying about the dreaded ‘you have insufficient funds’ popup when trying to reload. If my next post has a similar graph then it looks like I’m back on track.

As an aside, Yegor suggested playing limit hold’em. Such a weird game! While the blinds were $0.05/$0.10 the swings were tiny and similar to NL2 – no wonder bankroll management is much lower for limit compared to no limit. It was also a struggle against draws – getting AA preflop was always a minefield as you try to build a pot while watching each street conspire to give your opponent that straight with his 67o.

Compared to NLHE, limit hold’em is allegedly much lower in variance while the contribution from the player’s skill is less (pot odds become a bigger factor than bluffs). Possibly that might be a plus point at microstakes though. Also it may have less of the internet generation of players (ie more players coming from live games and less from 2p2), which might be useful too. I’m not sure how much effort I want to put into it though, but possibly more than PLO – I’m coming to hate variance…